Wells
The Lure of the Shore: Authenticity, Spectacle, and the
Wreck of the St. Paul
Jamin Wells1
Abstract
This paper investigates the spectacle of shipwreck and marine salvage through the wreck of the transatlantic
passenger liner St. Paul near Long Branch, New Jersey in 1896. As a dangerous ship trap, the New Jersey shore
witnessed many shipwrecks. By the late nineteenth century, the region‟s extensive infrastructure facilitated the
massive crowds that turned coastal wrecks into national spectacles. Businesses and entrepreneurs commodified these
spectacles, exploiting fin-de-siècle America‟s fascination with the maritime world, technology, and “authentic”
experiences. Commodification ultimately undermined spectators‟ search for authenticity, and successful salvage
only reaffirmed the faith in American modernity that the wreck had challenged. Yet their sustained popularity during
this period suggests that shipwreck spectacles fulfilled some of their promise. As a representative example, the St.
Paul wreck demonstrates how shipwreck spectacles were an essential element of the lure of the shore in turn-of-thecentury America.
On a stormy night in January 1896, one of the newest and largest transatlantic passenger liners
ran aground on its final approach to the port of New York. The bump was so slight that few
aboard the St. Paul realized they had hit the New Jersey shore. As one passenger later admitted,
“I turned over and went back to sleep.” 2 Though the St. Paul was not in any immediate danger,
its owners acted quickly to free the stranded liner. Salvage vessels dispatched from New York,
Delaware, and Virginia raced to the scene. As passengers and their luggage were rescued from
the wreck, crowds of spectators swarmed the shore to witness the sublime scene. 3
For ten days the massive steamship loomed just a few hundred yards from Long Branch, New
Jersey‟s famous Iron Pier. During that time, scores of professional marine salvors, known as
wreckers, manned the fleet of tugboats, derricks, and barges that labored to save the fourth
largest passenger liner in the world [Figure 1]. Tens of thousands of urbanites from New York
City and Philadelphia, as well as an untold number of New Jerseyans, traveled to Long Branch to
experience the spectacle of shipwreck and salvage. The spectacle along the beach and offshore
became a sensationalized and entertaining public display that lured a captive audience. Railroads
offered special direct trains and local businessmen opened boarded-up hotels and restaurants to
serve the crowds that flocked to the St. Paul. Interest in the shipwreck extended far beyond the
confines of Long Branch. Newspapers across the country published daily updates of the
shipwreck, the salvage effort, and the ever-growing throngs of spectators. Illustrated articles
appeared in major periodicals including Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s Weekly, and Scientific
American. And an eclectic mix of boosters, commentators, and humorists seized upon the
example of the wreck to bolster an argument for “necessary” maritime improvements, critique
American society, or make an easy joke.
1
Hagley Fellow, University of Delaware.
“Passengers Call It a Race,” New York Times, January 26, 1896.
3
Ibid; “Capt. Jamison Makes Report,” New York Tribune, February 4, 1896; Transcript of Record, 52-54, 72-73, 87,
Case Number 909 Israel J. Merritt et al. v. The Steamship "St. Paul."; Case Files; U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit; Records of the United States Courts of Appeals, Record Group 276; National Archives and Records
Administration--National Archives at New York.
2
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New Jersey History 126:2
Figure 1: F. Cresson Schell, The American Line Steamship "St. Paul" Ashore off
Long Branch, Leslie’s Weekly, February 6, 1896.
By all appearances—the scale of the salvage effort, the extent of the media attention, and the size
of the crowds—the St. Paul accident was extraordinary. But shipwreck, salvage, and spectacle
were not exceptional during the late-nineteenth century. By the time the St. Paul went ashore,
shipwreck events had become relatively safe, almost routine affairs. They remained a necessary,
if unfortunate, consequence of commerce in a burgeoning capitalist society dependent on
waterborne transportation. Yet for many, shipwrecks were also opportunities. In an increasingly
legible, connected, and integrated coastal realm, savvy entrepreneurs and established
businesspeople commodified coastal shipwrecks, turning frequent catastrophes into mass
spectacles. Shipwreck spectacles were one way in which the sea, shore, and disaster were
domesticated and commercialized, and they forged links between the littoral, mass culture, and
the evolving technologies of turn-of-the-century America.
When the St. Paul wrecked, shipwrecks spoke to some of the central concerns of the age. Gazing
upon or reading about wrecks fed into fin-de-siècle America‟s fascination with the maritime
world and technology, what historian David Nye terms the “technological sublime.” 4 Similarly,
shipwrecks (disasters many saw as opportunities) became significant touchstones as narratives of
rebirth and regeneration decisively shaped private sentiment and public discourse and as
Americans routinely sought out sublime scenes of “authentic” destruction.5 Shipwrecks on the
New Jersey shore routinely drew thousands of spectators and garnered sustained attention in
national media outlets. High visibility and wide appeal produced mass spectacles, which
4
David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper Collins,
2009).
5
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ironically undermined many spectators‟ pursuit of an authentic experience. Still, the frequency
and magnitude of shipwreck spectacles suggests that they fulfilled a widespread desire to
escape—if only temporarily—the quotidian details of modern life.
Shipwrecks like the St. Paul suggested the vulnerability of human mastery of the world and
brought into question the perfectibility of technology. But even as shipwrecks became mass
spectacles, no master shipwreck narrative developed—different groups continued to tell different
narratives depending on who they were, where they were, what they knew, how they knew it,
and what their motives were. For some, shipwrecks challenged unbridled confidence in material
progress, technological mastery, and American exceptionalism, reinforcing their ambivalence
with modernity. For others, shipwrecks conjured up narratives of heroic surfmen, beneficent
bureaucracy, technological efficacy, and American humanitarianism. Successful salvage only
reaffirmed those beliefs. Hotly debated at the moment, memory of the St. Paul, like that of many
coastal shipwrecks, faded fast in a modern world always looking for the next media event.
The Shipwreck and Salvage of the St. Paul
The St. Paul was less than a year old when it ran aground off Long Branch in 1896. Six days
before the accident, it had departed Southampton, England with 260 passengers including a
Russian prince, a former U.S. Congressman, and more than 120 immigrants heading to cities
across the United States. The beginning of the voyage offered smooth sailing but a succession of
storms marred its final three days. On the last morning, a rival British liner, the Campania, fell in
with the St. Paul and the two raced toward New York. As one passenger later described, “A gale
was blowing and the ships were plowing through heavy seas.” 6 Shortly after six in the evening
the liners steamed into fog. Onward they raced through the night, the fog thickening as they
neared the American shore.
Approaching the entrance to the port of New York from the Atlantic Ocean has always been a
complicated feat of navigation—to the west lie the shifting sandbars off New Jersey; to the
northeast, the wreck-strewn Long Island coast. By the end of the nineteenth century, the dangers
of the approach were enshrined in popular folklore and codified in government publications. The
1894 United States Coast Pilot, a specialized government publication for mariners, issued a stern
warning: “In thick or foggy weather, when the ship‟s reckoning indicates that she is near the
Jersey coast, great care should be taken to make frequent and accurate soundings with an armed
lead . . . [if a mariner] has reason to believe he is too near the coast, [he] should put the ship‟s
head offshore and stand off.” 7 Popular wisdom held that the northern New Jersey coast was a
6
“Passengers Call It a Race,” New York Times, January 26, 1896; “Customs List of Passengers” for St. Paul, 4
February 1896, Ancestry.com, New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 http://content.ancestrylibrary.com (accessed
March 13, 2009). For an overview of the St. Paul shipwreck and salvage see: William Henry Flayhart III, The
American Line, 1871-1902 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 225-246; and Flayhart, Perils of the
Atlantic: Steamship Disasters 1850 to Present (New York, W.W. Norton: 2003), 164-184.
7
Treasury Department, United States Coast Pilot: Part 5: From New York to Chesapeake Bay Entrance, first ed.
(Washington: GPO, 1894), 29.
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New Jersey History 126:2
“graveyard” with a “bad reputation,” what mariners and underwater archaeologists call “ship
traps.” 8
Dangers certainly remained, but the New Jersey coastline (as well as much of the American
shore) was ringed in a dense web of institutions that guided navigators, identified vessels,
reported disasters, and rescued life and property. Five lighthouses and two light-vessels offered
visible markers for mariners on the otherwise featureless terrain between Montauk, Long Island
and Cape May, New Jersey. A handful of fog signals rang with little effect the night the St. Paul
approached New York. United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS) Stations, located every ten
miles, maintained patrols along the coast from the beginning of August through the end of May
to locate and assist vessels in distress. Strategically located wind signal stations, operated by the
United States Weather Bureau, displayed flags indicating weather predictions “for the benefit of
mariners.” And four seacoast telegraph stations, operated by the Western Union Telegraph
Company, reported passing vessels to the New York Maritime Exchange, a clearinghouse for
commercial news. Finally, a loose network of fishermen and other coastal residents earned extra
income reporting maritime causalities to New York wrecking companies. 9
Well aware of the hazards in approaching the port of New York, Captain John Clark Jamison
slowed the St. Paul as it neared the coastline. Jamison was a respected mariner with over twenty
years of “honorable” service on transatlantic passengers. 10 But the combination of dense fog,
windy conditions, strong currents, and crude navigation techniques foiled his otherwise cautious
approach. The St. Paul ran ashore off “the Branch” a little before two in the morning on
Saturday, January 25, initiating a well-oiled rescue and response effort.
USLLS surfman Charles Sexton discovered the stranded liner shortly after it ran aground on his
midnight to 4 a.m. watch. After signaling the St. Paul, he hurried back to the Long Branch LifeSaving Station and roused the seven-man crew. They carted the “wrecking apparatus” to the liner
and sent the first shot across the vessel (no small feat). 11 Being in no immediate danger, Captain
Jamison signaled the life-saving crews that all would remain on board the St. Paul until the
morning. His first message ashore was directed to the New York Maritime Exchange. The
Maritime Exchange, what a contemporary described as “the marine sensorium of the Western
Hemisphere,” served as a communications hub, forwarding the news to the liner‟s owners,
insurers, and other interested parties, including the Merritt and Chapman wrecking companies. 12
The Merritt organization also received news of the St. Paul from Long Branch fisherman Nelson
Lockwood within a half hour of it going ashore. 13 The USLLS crews spent the early morning
8
For example see: “Big St. Paul Runs Aground,” New York Herald, January 26, 1896; “St. Paul Hard Aground,”
The Sun [New York], January 26, 1896; Jeannette Rattray, Perils of the Port of New York: Maritime Disasters from
Sandy Hook to Execution Rocks (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973).
9
Treasury Department, United States Coast Pilot: Part 5, 10-22; Treasury Department, United States Coast Pilot:
Atlantic Coast Part IV: From Point Judith to New York, 3rd edition (Washington: GPO, 1899): 10-21. Robert D.
MacMillen, Black Horse of the Sea (New York: Joseph D. McGuire, 1929).
10
Flayhart, American Line, 145, 233; “Capt. John Clark Jamison,” New York Times, January 26, 1896; “The St. Paul
Report,” New York Tribune, February 20, 1896.
11
Sumner I. Kimball, Annual Report of the Operations of the United States Life-Saving Service for the Fiscal Year
Ending June 30, 1896 (Washington: GPO, 1897), 136.
12
Richard Wheatley, “The New York Maritime Exchange,” Harper’s Magazine (April 1890): 758.
13
Transcript of Record, 195-204; RG 276; NARA NY.
Wells
hours ferrying passengers‟ dispatches ashore and to the nearby telegraph office. From multiple
sources, then, news of the stranding reached New York City and beyond.
A little after dawn, a veritable fleet of specialized salvage vessels known as wrecking steamers
reached the St. Paul from New York after a daring three-hour run through thick fog. 14 As word
spread, steamers from Delaware and Virginia also headed toward Long Branch. Within twentyfour hours, a significant part of the country‟s wrecking apparatus had arrived on the scene.15
Newspaper reporters caught the morning train down the Jersey shore. And as wreckers hastened
to free the liner, afternoon dailies from Boston, Massachusetts, to Santa Fe, New Mexico,
published front-page stories about the accident based on, as one local writer quipped, “hearsay
and supposition.” Yet all the papers had a relatively sanguine opinion of the St. Paul‟s fate.16
By the 1890s, the region‟s once ad hoc wrecking industry had evolved into a consolidated,
professional, and remarkably proficient corporate enterprise.17 Unparalleled opportunities,
profits, and experience spurred New York‟s wrecking companies, making them among the best
in the world. Hours after the St. Paul ran ashore, the New York Sun proclaimed “the removal of
stranded ships on a beach like Jersey‟s has been reduced to an absolute science.” 18 Still, the
potential for failure—and the dramatic—remained. The USLLS reported twenty deaths related to
shipwrecks in 1896, 770 since it began counting in 1871. 19 Of 134 vessels that wrecked off the
northern New Jersey coast between 1880 and 1896, only 72 were fully recovered. 20 Wreckers
probably stripped the remaining vessels and abandoned the hulks to a sublime landscape of
twisted metal and rotting wood. Little wonder then that Israel Merritt gave a “dismal smile” to a
reporter who asked what the chances where for salvaging the liner. 21
Curious spectators began to descend on Long Branch less than six hours after the St. Paul ran
aground. A local resident described the scene at first light: “She looked like a mountain, and the
green lights gave her a ghostly, gruesome look.” 22 Men, women, and children travelled by train,
carriage, and foot to the Branch. By noon, thousands were standing along the bulkhead closest to
the liner. There were so many people that one reporter described the beach as “made black by the
moving concourse.”23 Offshore, the St. Paul rocked in the heavy seas as more than a dozen
salvage vessels endeavored to rescue it. By the New York Tribune‟s account,
14
Transcript of Record, 59; 909; RG 276; NARA NY.
This was the assessment of Judge Brown, who presided over the ensuing salvage case: The St. Paul, 82 F. 104,
Lexis 68 [D.C, S.D NY, 1897].
16
Monmouth Democrat [Freehold, NJ], January 30 1896; “Off Long Branch,” Boston Daily Journal, January 25,
1896; “The St. Paul Ashore,” Kansas City Star, January 25, 1896; “Liner St. Paul in Trouble,” Santa Fe New
Mexican, January 25, 1896; “Rammed the U.S.,” Minneapolis Journal, January 25, 1896. On general tone of reports
see also: “St. Paul, Speeding in a Fog, Goes Aground,” New York Times, January 26, 1896.
17
Dennis M. Powers, Taking the Sea: Perilous Waters, Sunken Ships, and the True Story of the Legendary Wrecker
Captains (New York: Amacom, 2009); Jamin Wells, “Professionalization and Cultural Perceptions of Marine
Salvage, 1850-1950,” Northern Mariner 17, no. 2 (2007): 7-16.
18
“St. Paul Hard Aground,” The Sun [New York], January 26, 1896.
19
Kimball, Annual Reports 1896, 14, 19.
20
Transcript of Record, 120; 909; RG 276; NARA NY.
21
“St. Paul, Speeding in a fog, Goes Aground,” New York Times, January 26, 1896.
22
“Crowds Watch the Big Ship,” New York Tribune, January 26, 1896.
23
“St. Paul, Speeding in a Fog, Goes Aground,” New York Times, January 26, 1896.
15
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New Jersey History 126:2
At 3 o‟clock it bore a decidedly retrousse appearance, and wagged backward and
forward under the impetus of the arriving and departing swells[,] which flirted
with it and threw foam over it as the wind blew it and caught the spray up in giant
handfuls and cast it high up in the air and washed the black sides of the helpless
monster till they glistened in the half-sunshine of the afternoon.
While the scene offshore may have been dramatic, the scene on the beach soon “drifted into a
sort of pleasure party.”24 The sound of the crowd‟s mirth competing with the crash of the
breakers. The USLSS finished transferring the last of the passengers and mail by 5 p.m.,
returning to their station after more than 24 hours of continuous labor. By sunset most of the
spectators had departed, the seas had calmed, and the wreckers had prepared for a major rescue
effort during the next high tide. A few hundred spectators lingered along the bulkhead opposite
the Grand View Hotel “gazing at the helpless vessel” lighted stem to stern with thousands of
incandescent bulbs. An observer described the radiant display as “one of the most beautiful
sights that has ever been seen here.” 25 Artist M. J. Burns captured the sublime scene for Harper’s
Weekly readers, allowing them to take part in the spectacle even if they could not physically be
present [Figure 2].26
Figure 2: M. J. Burns, As She Lay on the Evening of January 30 th, Harpers Weekly, February 8,
1896.
On the second morning, Sunday newspapers across the country published accounts of the
shipwreck, the salvage effort, and the swelling crowds gleaned from the Associated Press wire
reports. Headlines in the St. Louis Republic, The San Francisco Call, Omaha‟s Sunday WorldHerald, and Chicago‟s Sunday Inter Ocean emphasized the St. Paul‟s race with the Campania,
which had also run aground before backing off under its own engine power.27 Boise‟s Idaho
Statesman, Lexington, Kentucky‟s Morning Herald, and dozens of other papers ran headlines
declaring the St. Paul “stuck,” “stranded,” and “ashore.” Even London‟s Sunday Times published
24
“The St. Paul Aground,” New York Tribune, January 26, 1896.
“St. Paul, Speeding in a Fog, Goes Aground,” New York Times, January 26, 1896; “Big St. Paul Runs Aground,”
New York Herald, January 26, 1896.
26
“The Stranding of the American Liner “St. Paul” on the New Jersey Coast, near Long Branch: From Drawings by
M. J. Burns and Photographs,” Harper’s Weekly, February 8, 1896, 125.
27
“The St. Paul is Ashore Off Long Branch: Raced with the Campania Until Within a Few Miles of Land,” St. Louis
Republic, January 26, 1896; “Grounding of the St. Paul,” The San Francisco Call, January 26, 1896; “Race on the
Ocean,” Sunday World-Herald [Omaha], January 26, 1896; “Many Lives in Peril,” Sunday Inter Ocean [Chicago],
January 26, 1896.
25
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a brief.28 The Knoxville Journal offered what might have been the day‟s most perceptive
headline—“Some Excitement Over the Stranded American Liner St. Paul.”
This newspaper coverage took place during a watershed moment in the history of the American
press. One scholar has gone so far to argue that 1897 was the “year that defined American
journalism.” 29 Newspapers had become a “big business” more important than ever in most
American‟s daily lives. Shipwrecks, like other disasters, were frequently subjects for the highly
competitive, profit-orientated news industry. Circulation skyrocketed as national and
international news increasingly displaced local stories. Papers were longer and larger, filled with
more images, features, and editorials. The Sunday papers that trumpeted the St. Paul‟s
predicament had only recently become commonplace, and the newspaper accounts of the St.
Paul shipwreck reflected the sensationalist, one-upmanship and media-created pseudo-events
that would characterize yellow journalism in the years to come. 30
The St. Paul shipwreck became a spectacle in print and in person. On the day it went ashore,
more than 10,000 people traveled to Long Branch to see the imperiled vessel [Figure 3]. The
scene, reported the New York Times, “resembled a country fair.” Farmers came from more than
twenty miles away. Fashionably dressed visitors arrived on trains from New York City and
Philadelphia to stroll or bicycle Ocean Avenue, the resort‟s main thoroughfare. Thousands more
sat on the cold, dark sand and frequented the many booths selling food and drink. Entrepreneurs
offered unobstructed views of the wreck from hotel verandas for five or ten cents. The Branch
took on the chaotic character of carnival as spectators paraded, gawked, bought, and bartered at
the summer resort in the middle of winter. And “the omnipresent amateur photographer,”
observed one reporter, “was in all his glory, and hundreds of snap shots were taken of the crowd,
the vessel, and the flotilla of tugs and lighters at sea.” 31 The Philadelphia Public Ledger aptly
labeled the scene “an impressive spectacle.” 32
28
“Stuck on a Sand Bar,” Idaho Daily Statesman [Boise], January 26, 1896; “Steamer Stranded,” Morning Herald
[Lexington, KT], January 26, 1896; “An Atlantic Liner Ashore,” The Sunday Times [London], January 25, 1896.
29
W. Joseph Campbell, The Year that Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (New York:
Routledge, 2006).
30
Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 260 years: 16901950 (New York: The MacMillian Co., 1950), 571-592.
31
Lighters are barges used for the conveyance of cargo from ship to shore, or vice versa. They often had cranes or
derricks on them. “St. Paul is Still Fast,” New York Times, January 27, 1896.
32
“Throngs of Sightseers,” [Philadelphia] Public Ledger, February 3, 1896. For a fuller description of carnival and
seaside resorts see: Rob Shields, “The „System of Pleasure‟: Liminality and the Carnivalesque at Brighton,” Theory,
Culture & Society 7 (1990): 39-72.
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New Jersey History 126:2
Figure 3: Scene on the Beach, New York Tribune, January 26, 1896.
By the 1890s, the cultural power of shipwrecks rested on spectacle—the large crowds,
sensational representations, ritual displays, and daily performances on the beach and offshore.
Modern technology, including trains, cameras, and the national media, helped to transform
unfortunate accidents into impressive and entertaining displays. But shipwreck spectacles like
the St. Paul were a product of the time, an expression of what historian Jackson Lears dubs the
“new commercial culture of spectacle” that engulfed turn-of-the-century America. 33 Shipwrecks,
like lynching, popular entertainment, public amusements, and world‟s fairs and expositions drew
cultural authority from contemporary assumptions about the undeniable veracity of visual
evidence. “To see an event,” writes Amy Louis Wood about this period, “was to understand its
truth.” But spectators did more than simply look at shipwrecks; they witnessed them. Many
witnessed shipwrecks in person, even more witnessed them through published narratives and
images. As witnesses, spectators conferred significance on shipwrecks, and they helped dictate
the meaning of the wreck on the beach and in the media. Witnesses played a decidedly public
role, one that united individuals to a larger group of fellow spectators. And the wide circulation
of narratives and images of shipwrecks significantly expanded their audience, creating what was
in effect an “imagined community” of shipwreck spectators. 34
33
Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 250.
I am heavily influenced by Wood‟s discussion and use of “spectacle” and “witnessing” in: Amy Louise Wood,
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1946 (University of North Carolina Press,
2009), for quote, 4-5.
34
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Published shipwreck narratives had, by the late nineteenth century, become highly standardized.
The Associated Press‟s news monopoly ensured that most of the country would read a terse
narrative that reproduced the St. Paul spectacle on a national scale by emphasizing the crowds of
spectators and sensationalizing the stakes of the wreck and salvage effort. 35 Published images of
the St. Paul were as standardized as the published narratives. All told, dozens of images of the St.
Paul were published in local and national newspapers and periodicals. 36 Most of these
depictions, drawing on the iconographic ship portrait motif, offered a broadside view of the
wreck surrounded by a tempestuous sea, foregrounded by the oftentimes-crowded shore. 37 One
notable departure from the “standard” shipwreck image was the drawing “Odd view of the St.
Paul” published in the New York Herald [Figure 4].38 In it, a fashionable group men and women
chat on a busy street. Two smoke stacks and a mast rise above the roofs and the liner‟s dark hull
is barely discernable in the distance. In “Odd view” the crowd and Long Branch—the
spectacle—remained the subject though the St. Paul itself was largely absent.
Figure 4: "Odd View of St. Paul," New York Herald, January 27, 1896.
No matter how people may have experienced the St. Paul, upstart entrepreneurs and established
corporations decisively shaped the narratives and images of this national spectacle. The
35
Menahem Blondheim, News on the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 18441897 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
36
Images were published in all the major New York and Philadelphia newspapers. The Chicago Inter-Ocean
published an image on January 26, 1896. Images also appeared in Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s Weekly, and Scientific
American.
37
On ship portraits motif see: John Wilmerding, American Marine Painting 2nd edition (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1987), 82-83, 146-150; Roger B. Stein, Seascape and the American Imagination (New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, 1975), 62-66.
38
“Odd View of the St. Paul,” New York Herald, January 27, 1896.
66
New Jersey History 126:2
Associated Press was in the business of supplying the news—a salable commodity—and the
content and structure of wire reports reflected its underlying profit motive. Photographers, artists
and salesmen also constructed images of the St. Paul that were designed to profit from the wreck,
but photographers went to the greatest lengths to craft the most marketable images. The New
York Herald lampooned the “camera fiends” who were “climbing upon the tops of spiles and
fencing, placing their instruments on verandas or dipping the feet of tripods in the sea” to get
“the shot.” 39 Their photographs were sensational, romantic images that reinforced the spectacle.
Long Branch photographer Christian Fredericksen stated, “I didn‟t intend to take any pictures at
all, because I supposed they would pull her off next day…[but then] I thought I would go down
and take pictures just for fun for my customers in the summer.” 40 Fredericksen was one of many
entrepreneurs who sold images of the stranded St. Paul.41 A stereograph distributed by one firm
offered an impressive three-dimensional perspective of the massive liner [Figure 5]. 42 All told,
salaried and freelance artists produced dozens of drawings and engravings for newspapers and
periodicals that highlighted the size of the St. Paul, the precariousness of its position, and the
heroism of passengers, wreckers, and first responders.
Figure 5: Stereograph of the St. Paul, Courtesy of Sharon Hazard.
In Long Branch, the scene off shore and along the beach changed little over the ensuing week. A
fleet of vessels encircled the stranded liner. Wreckers unloaded cargo, repositioned anchors, and
39
“St. Paul Still Fast in the Sand,” New York Herald, January 27, 1896.
Transcript of Record, 147; 909; RG 276; NARA NY.
41
In addition to Fredericksen, at least one other professional photographer, C.H. Cottrell, took many photographs of
the St. Paul. Transcript of Record, 140-147; 909; RG 276; NARA NY. The renowned Pach Brothers firm likely took
the photographs that served as a basis for drawings in Harper’s Weekly and other major news outlets. See: Harper’s
Weekly, February 8, 1896, 125. The F.M. Publishing Company, publishers of Long Branch‟s local newspaper,
advertised in local newspapers: “Pictures of the St. Paul: We will send by mail, post paid, for ten cents in stamps one
handsome half tone photograph of the Steamer St. Paul. Size 9x12, suitable for framing.” The Freehold Transcript
[Freehold, NJ], February 7 and 14, 1896; The Red Bank Register [Red Bank, NJ], February 5 and 26, 1896.
Unfortunately, I have not located any extent copies of these images. See also: Throngs of Sightseers,” Public Ledger
[Philadelphia], February 3, 1896.
42
I owe a debt of gratitude to Long Branch historian Sharon Hazard for sharing this stereoscope of the St. Paul from
her personal collection.
40
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pulled the St. Paul with tugboats, yet they moved it less than seventy feet. Unseasonably calm
weather hindered the salvage effort. As the wreckers explained: “We always need a sea to help
get a ship off” because if “we get a little roll on the ship [from wind and waves] there is no
trouble.” 43 But for a week there was no wind or waves to help rock the St. Paul off the beach.
Despite the lack of progress with the salvage, large crowds continued to flock to Ocean Avenue.
For those unable to make the journey, reporters waxed eloquently (if sensationally) about the
picturesque sea and sky that framed the spectacle, describing the St. Paul as an “impressive
sight,” “helpless monster,” “magnificent steamship,” “stately vessel,” and “monster ship.” 44
Meanwhile, the accident and salvage efforts served as a lightning rod for contemporaries,
gathering attention and inspiring an eclectic group of promoters to use the event to showcase a
cause or bolster an argument. Vernon Brown, president of the New York Maritime Exchange,
invoked the shipwreck to support the organization‟s lobby for federal improvements to the port
of New York. Hours after the liner ran aground, Brown sent a letter calling for a government
vessel to be stationed at the port to aid distressed vessels and prevent accidents. 45 Six days later,
Brown used a similar argument in Washington, D.C., while promoting a bill that would have
provided a new aid to navigation near the entrance to New York Bay. 46 William Strong, the
reform mayor of New York City, referenced the St. Paul in his successful bid to erect a new,
larger dry dock in Brooklyn. 47 And W. H. Beehler, a lieutenant at the US Naval Hydrographic
Office, used the wreck to illustrate his theory that atmospheric conditions influence the Gulf
Stream.48
The St. Paul also served as fodder for humorists, dramatists, and punsters. “The St. Paul Lies
Beside the Sea,” a doggerel published by several papers, mocked the despair of the wreckers
who “dropped a bitter tear” over their inability to free the stranded liner [Figure 6]. 49 The night
before the wreckers succeeded, Philadelphia‟s Eleventh Street Opera House premiered a skit:
“The St. Paul in the Sand: or, Stuck on Jersey.” The skit served as the finale for the popular
Dumont‟s Minstrels show, one of the few regular minstrel shows that remained in the northeast
by the late 1890s. It contributed to what the Philadelphia Inquirer described as the theatre‟s
ongoing “burlesquing of current public matters in such a manner as to afford a rich entertainment
of wit.” 50 Two months after wreckers freed the St. Paul, Puck, a popular weekly humor
magazine, could still reference the accident and Long Branch‟s notorious underground gambling
industry:
43
Transcript of Record, 81, 100; RG 276; NARA NY.
“Fast Locked in the Sand,” New York Tribune, February 29, 1896; “St. Paul Moved a Short Distance,”
[Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, January 29, 1896; “Big St. Paul Runs Aground,” New York Herald, January 26,
1896; “The St. Paul Still Fast,” New York Times, January 29, 1896.
45
“A Sea-Going Revenue Vessel Needed,” New York Tribune, January 26, 1896.
46
“A New Lightship off Fire Island,” New York Times, February 2, 1896.
47
“Favors a Big Dry Dock,” New York Times, February 14, 1896; “Danger Lurks for Platt and Morton,”
Philadelphia Inquirer, February 16, 1896; “Great Dock to Be Built,” New York Times, March 12, 1896.
48
“Dangers of the Gulf Stream,” New York Times, January 30, 1896; “Winds Affect Currents,” New York Times,
February 23, 1896.
49
“The St. Paul Lies Beside the Sea,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1896. Editorial, New York Tribune,
January 31, 1896.
50
“What Was Done at the Theatres,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1896; “Eleventh Street Opera House,”
Philadelphia Inquirer, February 9, 1896. Frank Dumont, The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork
Encyclopedia (London: M. Witmark & Sons, 1899), 5-7.
44
68
New Jersey History 126:2
I see where the St. Paul‟s going ashore at Long Branch cost the American Line
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Perrins: I don‟t doubt it! I was there myself for two weeks last summer. 51
Lea:
Figure 6: The St. Paul Lies Beside the Sea, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1896
Perrins‟s cynicism was not misplaced. Long Branch entrepreneurs had acted quickly after the St.
Paul ran aground to turn disaster into profit. Local hackmen (drivers of hacks or carriages for
hire) were among the first to realize the windfall generated by the seaside spectacle. On the
morning of the wreck, nobody knew why so many people were getting off the train. By the
afternoon, the first thing anybody heard as they left the train station was, according to one
reporter, “the stentorian call of the hackman: „Here you are! Fifteen minutes to the wreck!‟ ” Not
incidentally, fares had doubled or tripled. 52 Business owners opened hotels and restaurants that
had been closed since fall. Stands selling lemonade, cigars, popcorn, and liquor appeared “like
magic.” Boys sold photographs of the stranded liner and professional crooks worked the crowds.
Even local fishermen profited by charging particularly enthusiastic spectators fifty cents to be
51
Puck, “Same Thing all the Year Round,” April 1, 1896, 11; on gambling see: Francis H. Hardy, “Seaside Life in
America,” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, January-June 1897, 37-45.
52
“Crowds Watch the Big Ship,” New York Tribune, January 26, 1896; “St. Paul Still Fast in the Sand,” New York
Herald, January 27, 1896.
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rowed around the St. Paul.53 Men, women, and children piled into overcrowded vessels and went
around the steamer “like some moving endless chain.” 54 Just three days after the stranding, the
New York Tribune could report, “From hotel men to peanut venders [sic] the Jerseymen are
gathering a golden harvest.” 55 By the time the St. Paul left Long Branch commentators estimated
the stranding had injected $15,000—equivalent to almost $400,000 in 2008 dollars—into the
summer resort‟s dormant economy in less than two weeks. 56
Not every Long Brancher profited from the St. Paul. Within two days of the wreck, owners of
waterfront property near the liner were complaining of the damage done by spectators. One
resident went as far as having some of the visitors arrested for trespassing on his property. Others
suffered more serious losses. The St. Paul went ashore within 50 yards of a collection of codfish
nets and poles. The fishermen, who owned the fishing gear and leased the spot, “warned the
wreckers not to trespass, and,” as one observer wryly noted, “these orders were so strictly obeyed
that the nets are almost entirely demolished.” 57 Even for locals (who arguably profited most from
the St. Paul), the narrative of the wreck resisted closure as different groups fashioned different
narratives based on who they were, what they did, and how they were affected. It was no
unalloyed boom for an otherwise struggling seaside resort.
The crowds occasionally overwhelmed the seasoned resort even as they contributed to its coffers.
The most spectators arrived on Sunday, February 2, eight days after the shipwreck. Long Branch
had prepared for several thousand, but at least 25,000 eventually arrived on their day off from
work. Five thousand Philadelphians, including a large contingent of laborers from the shipyard
that built the St. Paul, filled almost 100 cars on the eight trains that ran to the Branch. Four
special trains ran from New York City, bringing thousands more. 58 Working-class laborers
mixed with middle-class families on Long Branch‟s winter boardwalk as blue-collar sociability
met white-collar restraint. The spectacle of the St. Paul suited both groups: relatively low
admission price (the price of a train ticket) and lack of language barriers drew the working class
as the opportunity for didactic leisure suited middle-class sensibilities. 59
Visitors comfortable with the commercialized leisure found in corner saloons and old Coney
Island haunts bought and bartered on an unexpected mid-winter Sunday picnic. Newspapers
disagree about whether saloonkeepers flaunted local blue codes and sold alcohol to thirsty
crowds. But hucksters quickly set up a roulette wheel and shell games, and balladeers
rhapsodized about the steamer‟s predicament. Every hotel and restaurant opened for business;
many had prepared special menus. For twenty-five cents, visitors could buy clam chowder, ham
53
“Crowds at Long Branch,” New York Times, February 3, 1896; “A Great Throng Gazed at St. Paul,” Philadelphia
Inquirer, January 3, 1896; “Viewed by Thousands,” New York Tribune, February 3, 1896;
54
“St. Paul Still Fast in the Sand,” New York Herald, January 27, 1896.
55
“Fast Locked in the Sand,” New York Tribune, January 29, 1896.
56
Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, “Purchasing Power of Money in the United States from 1774 to
2008,” MeasuringWorth, 2009, accessed January 20, 2010, http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/; “St. Paul
Gets Off,” New York Herald, February 5, 1896.
57
“The Liner Still Helpless,” New York Tribune, January 28, 1896; “Long Branch,” New York Times, January 31,
1896.
58
“Crowds at Long Branch,” New York Times, February 3, 1896.
59
On leisure during this time see: Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an
Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Cathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements:
Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
70
New Jersey History 126:2
sandwiches, or soup from one of the innumerable small stands that lined Ocean Avenue. By one
in the afternoon they had all run out of food. Local grocers, butchers, bakers, and delicatessens
opened, selling cakes, pies, and crackers. Prices skyrocketed until their stock also ran dry. By the
late afternoon, the spectators were eager to get back on the trains after a long day at the shore. 60
Railroad companies ran more than a dozen special trains from Philadelphia and New York
during the eleven days that the St. Paul was ashore. The Pennsylvania Railroad charged $1.50 for
a round trip fare from Philadelphia, seventy-five cents for children under twelve.61 Indeed, the
spectacle‟s economic boon reached far beyond Long Branch. As the New York Times eventually
concluded, “While the St. Paul was ashore the residents of Long Branch and the railroads
profited greatly.”62 The wreckers who freed the St. Paul also profited handsomely from the St.
Paul. In addition to employing hundreds of extra men, their $160,000 salvage award—equivalent
to almost $4.3 million in 2008 dollars—was the second largest on record. 63
After ten days of around-the-clock work, a favorable shift in the weather helped wreckers pull
the St. Paul off Long Branch‟s sandbar. A building nor‟easter rocked the St. Paul as four
wrecking steamers dragged the liner off the beach a little before 10 a.m. on February fourth. An
hour after the liner left, the last of the wrecking vessels departed, and the shore, “so long dotted
with spectators, was deserted.” 64 The St. Paul docked at its pier in Lower Manhattan before two
that afternoon. The summer resort lost its winter drawing card. “There is an aching void in the
heart of every Long Brancher to-night,” editorialized a Philadelphia newspaper, “for their pet
attraction, the St. Paul, instead of being on the beach, as a feast for thousands of pairs of eyes, is
safely moored at her dock.” 65 Long Branch soon returned to the slower rhythms of a seaside
resort in early February. The liner resumed service.66 And the seaside spectacle faded from
memory.
A Familiar and Fascinating Sight
Long Branch‟s reputation for hosting fantastic spectacles was well established when the St. Paul
wrecked in 1896. Since the late eighteenth century, trips to the New Jersey resort town had
inevitably included high-stakes gambling, thrilling horse races, teeming beaches, and eclectic
crowds.67 Prominent politicians and patent medicine millionaires mixed with gamblers,
60
“Crowds at Long Branch,” New York Times, February 3, 1896; “A Great Throng Gazed at St. Paul,” Philadelphia
Inquirer, January 3, 1896; “Viewed by Thousands,” New York Tribune, February 3, 1896; “The St. Paul Floated,”
Red Bank Register [Red Bank, NJ], February 5, 1896.
61
Advertisement, [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, January 31, 1896.
62
“St. Paul Safely Floated,” New York Times, February 5, 1896.
63
Officer and Williamson, “Purchasing Power;” “Still Fast in the Sand,” New York Times, February 1, 1896; The St.
Paul: Merritt et al. v. The St. Paul; Same v. International Nav. Co., 82 F. 104, Lexis 68 (U.D. Dist. 1897); “Large
Salvage on St. Paul,” New York Times, April 24, 1898; Transcript of Record, 87, 163-168, 174-175; 909; RG 276;
NARA NY.
64
“St. Paul Gets Off,” New York Herald, February 5, 1896.
65
“The Scene on the Shore,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5, 1896.
66
“St. Paul will Sail Wednesday,” New York Times, February 20, 1896; “Maritime News: By Cable,” New York
Times, March 6, 1896.
67
Witers‟ Project, Work Projects Administration, State of New Jersey, Entertaining a Nation: The Career of Long
Branch, American Guide Series (Bayonne, NJ: Jersey Printing Company), 43-98; Richmond Barrett, Good Old
Summer Days: Newport, Narragansett Pier, Saratoga, Long Branch, and Bar Harbor (New York: D. Appleton-
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confidence men, and wealthy elites during the busy summer season. Unlike other popular late
nineteenth-century resorts, Long Branch continued to accommodate visitors of all social
classes.68 It served as the nation‟s unofficial summer capital during the 1870s and 1880s, offering
four consecutive U.S. administrations reprieve from Washington, D.C.‟s heat and welcoming
weekend trains filled with thousands of working-class day-trippers from nearby cities and factory
towns. By the 1890s, however, the resort was past its prime, having lost its biggest attraction—
the Monmouth Park Racetrack—to Republican antigambling legislation. Despite its struggles,
diverse crowds continued to visit the Branch. As late as 1897 a Life magazine writer could note
“society at the Branch is like its drinks—very much mixed.” 69
Shipwrecks were another prominent feature of late nineteenth-century Long Branch. In the
sixteen years before the St. Paul wrecked, salvage experts counted almost 200 vessels that “went
ashore on the Jersey coast” between Sandy Hook and Barnegat Light. 70 At least one vessel
wrecked near Long Branch each year between 1889 and 1896. Forty-six days before the St. Paul
wrecked, the steamship Irrawaddy went ashore in fog not far from the Branch‟s famous Iron
Pier. Even as wrecking tugs struggled to rescue the St. Paul, the ship Foyle wrecked just two
miles north.71 Hours after the St. Paul finally docked in New York City, the British steamship
Lamington met disaster less than fifty-five miles east of Long Branch. Two days later, the
schooner Asenath A. Shaw went ashore 65 miles south of the resort. 72 In 1897, the year after the
St. Paul accident, at least three vessels wrecked within five miles of the Iron Pier. Northern New
Jersey was, in short, a dangerous ship trap for transatlantic and coastal shipping at the end of the
nineteenth century.
Even so, the frequency of shipwrecks near Long Branch was not uncommon for the time. A
conservative tally by the United States Life-Saving Service in 1896 estimated nearly 9,000 ships
had wrecked since 1871 along portions of the American coast under its ever-expanding
purview.73 The number of wrecks listed in government publications the year the St. Paul ran
ashore ranged from 680 to 1,313.74 These numbers (averaging roughly two to three wrecks each
day) should be read as low estimates because they represent only reported incidents; even a
casual survey of contemporary newspapers affirms the extraordinary number of shipwrecked,
Century Company, 1941), 244-248; William Nelson, ed., The New Jersey Coast in Three Centuries vol. 2 (New
York: Lewis Publishing Company, 1902), 50-53.
68
John Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport & Coney Island (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001).
69
Joseph Smith, “Life‟s Personally Conducted Tours: Long Branch,” Life, June 24, 1897, 532.
70
This is a roughly fifty-mile stretch of coastline. Long Branch is approximately twelve miles south of Sandy Hook
and thirty-eight miles north of Barnegat Light. Transcript of Record, 85-86, 120; 909; RG 276; NARA NY.
71
“Wrecks and Rescues of the Past,” New York Times, January 27, 1896; “On Shrewbury Rocks,” New York
Tribune, January 27, 1896.
72
“Another Ship in the Sand,” New York Tribune, February 6, 1896; Kimball, Annual Report 1896, 141.
73
These numbers reflect the operations of the USLLS rather than the total number of wrecks off the American
coastline. There were 8,982 “disasters” that occurred within the operations of the Service, which did not expand
beyond the east coast to include Texas, the Great Lakes, and portions of the Pacific Coast until the 1880s and 1890s.
Kimball, Annual Report 1896, 19.
74
Six-hundred-and-eighty “disasters” occurred within the operations of the USLSS in the fiscal year ending on June
30, 1896. The extent of operations included 256 stations on the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Lakes coasts. The larger
figure, includes, “disasters to vessels which occurred on and near the coasts and on the rivers of the United States”
in 1896, as tabulated in the Statistical Abstracts. Kimball, Annual Report 1896, 14; Bureau of Statistics, Statistical
Abstract of the United States (1897), 392.
72
New Jersey History 126:2
stranded, or lost vessels off the American coast during this period. In the dynamic littoral hard
numbers were difficult to compile, vessels disappeared, and human mastery remained at best
tenuous.
While shipwrecks were familiar events for turn-of-the-century Americans, several factors
distinguished the St. Paul accident. The liner was a well-known vessel at the center of national
discussions about America‟s place in a rapidly changing world. Currier and Ives, the New York
publishing firm renown for capitalizing on especially interesting, newsworthy topics, published a
lithograph of the St. Paul around the time it was launched in 1895.75 Along with its sister ship the
St. Louis, the St. Paul was the first competitive American-built transatlantic passenger vessel to
be launched in decades. 76 The vessels‟ size, speed, seaworthiness, and luxury demonstrated the
competency of the oft-maligned American shipbuilding industry; symbolized the efforts of
American business and government to develop the country‟s international stature; and
represented hope for a return to American maritime preeminence. 77 Discussion of either vessel
was infused with blind patriotism—indeed, they sailed for the American Line. After inspecting
both vessels, one commentator declared: “America may [now] safely challenge the world.”78
And challenge it did. On its third voyage, the St. Paul beat a British-built rival to the dock in a
dramatic twenty-hour race.79 When the St. Paul wrecked, people on both sides of the Atlantic
took notice.80
Interest in the St. Paul shipwreck was part of an ongoing American preoccupation with the
maritime world. 81 At the end of the nineteenth century, attention to the sea, shore, and
shipwrecks developed as broader trends reshaped how people thought about and interacted with
the sea and shore. The closing of the frontier, rising waves of immigration, the decline of the
merchant marine, the growth of coastal tourism, rapid technological developments, and overseas
imperial aspirations and expeditions changed America‟s relationship with the sea. Uncertainty
reigned as America‟s maritime industries faced stiff international competition. Paradoxically,
physical changes to turn-of-the-century ports solidified a new spatial regime that separated urban
citizens from the working sea at the same time the nation began to look abroad. Isolated from
working waterfronts, most people increasingly encountered the sea at one of the nation‟s many
75
Gale Research Company, Currier and Ives: A Catalogue Raisonné (Detroit: Book Tower, 1984). For actual print:
“St. Paul (Hull 278), of the American Line,” Philadelphia Maritime Museum Collection (83.17.3).
76
For the definitive account of the American Line see: Flayhart, American Line.
77
John G. B. Hutchins, The American Merchant Industries and Public Policy, 1789-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1941), 533-536; Alex Roland, et. al., The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History
Reenvisioned, 1600-2000 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), 209-224; Flayhart, American Line, 137-224.
78
Francis Churchill Williams, “Art in Ship-Building,” Harper’s Weekly, October 26, 1895, 1013; Flayhart,
American Line, 171-226.
79
The rival—the British-built Campania—was the same liner the St. Paul would race through the fog before
wrecking off Long Branch. “A Race Between Ocean Liners,” New York Tribune, December 14, 1895.
80
“An Atlantic Liner Ashore,” The Sunday Times [London], January 26, 1896; “The Steamer St. Paul,” The
Standard [London], January 28, 1896.
81
This argument complicates Helen Rozwadowski‟s claim that “The ocean‟s depths lost their firm hold on the
Anglo-American cultural imagination” beginning in the 1880s. Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The
Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 217. Shipwreck
spectacles suggest that Rozwadowski‟s “cultural interest in the ocean‟s depths” merely shifted to the littoral,
particularly the dangerous littoral. As Allen Sekula writes: “The sea returns, often in gothic guise, remembered and
forgotten at the same time, always linked to death, but in a strangely disembodied way.” Allan Sekula, “Between the
Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs),” October 102 (Fall 2002), 14.
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coastal resorts, like Coney Island, which offered a leisure experience of the sea and shore
mediated by profit and loss. Still, romanticized, fanciful notions continued to dominate popular
conceptions of the sea and shore even as Americans engaged them in new and decidedly modern
ways.82
The contours of America‟ new relationship with the sea was reflected in American culture.
Stephen Crane, Jack London, and many other sailor-writers including Morgan Robertson,
Lincoln Colcord, and Thornton Hains reinvigorated American sea fiction during this period.
Their adventure literature began to appear in the 1890s, elegizing the “lost glory” of the age of
sail even as it tepidly embraced steam navigation. 83 Around the same time, a distinct American
style of marine painting matured in the work of Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert
Pinkham Ryder. One scholar celebrates this period as the “great age” of American marine
painting. For another, it marked the “end of an era.” 84 Either way, the country‟s changing
relationship with the sea was reflected in the period‟s art and literature. Popular culture was
similarly affected as a veritable maritime craze swept the country. The solo-sailing exploits of
Joshua Slocum shared headlines with polar explorers, distant naval engagements, and local yacht
club regattas. Discussions of America‟s Cup races and transatlantic passenger liners were infused
with nationalist rhetoric. Closer to home, popular periodicals urged “ingenuous boys” to build
boats. And by the late 1890s, scores of films offered urban theatergoers dramatic images of
sailing ships, ocean liners, harbors, storms, and shipwrecks. 85
Shipwrecks in particular offered compelling images, sensational stories, and physical sites that
captivated modern audiences. They were disasters and turn-of-the-century Americans “loved”
disasters. Kevin Rozario argues during the late nineteenth century, American culture became a
“culture of calamity.” Disasters, destruction, chaos—the building blocks of modern, corporate
American society—became a thrill, a fascination for Americans whose prosperity was founded
on the creative destruction of capitalist development. As Rozario argues, “a society founded on
82
On America‟s changing relationship to the sea see: Benjamin W. Labaree et al., America and the Sea: A Maritime
History (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport, 1998), 363-475; and Roland et al., Way of the Ship, 181-263; Josef W.
Knovitz, “Changing Concepts of the Sea, 1550-1950,” Terrae Incognitae 11 (January 1979): 1-17; Josef W.
Knovitz, “The Crises of Atlantic Port Cities, 1880-1920,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (April
1994): 293-318.
83
Bert Bender, Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 148.
84
Wilmerding, American Marine Painting, 154; Stein, 123.
85
On popular culture see: Michael F. Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (New York:
Sheridan House, 1999 [1899]); Albert B. Farnham, “A Cheap Skiff,” Youth’s Companion, June 21, 1894, 291;
George A. Stewart, “Boats that Boys Can Build,” Youth’s Companion, March 7, 1895, 118; Stewart, “Boats that
Boys Can Build: Part II,” Youth’s Companion, March 14, 1895, 128; George R. Riley, “How to Build a Bicycle
Boat,” The Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1904, 25. Plans for building boats were also published in many of the
“how-to” books published for boys during this period. See for example: Daniel C. Beard, The American Boys Handy
Book (New York, 1907 [1882]), 95-131, 281-285, 389-409; Daniel C. Beard, The Jack of All Trades (New York,
1914 [1896]), 146-169; Beard, The Outdoor Handy Book (New York, 1914 [1896]), 156-221; and Maurice
Thompson, ed., The Boys Book of Sports (New York, 1886), 91-99, 199-232. Examples of relevant films from 1899
include: Wreck of the Norseman, (USA, 1899); Wreck of the ‘Mohican,’ (USA, 1899); Wreck of the S.S. ‘Paris’
(USA, 1899); and The Breeches Buoy, American Mutoscope & Biograph (USA, 1899). Imdb.com lists film titles
for this period that, while incomplete, suggest the frequency of maritime topics. “1899 Films‟ Search,” Internet
Movie Database, accessed March 4, 2007, http://www.imbd.com (accessed March 4, 2007).
74
New Jersey History 126:2
creative destruction had to develop a cultural appreciation for annihilation.” 86 Shipwrecks
annihilated, they created, and they were popular in fin-de-siècle America.
Further, the metaphor of the shipwreck, a well-worn rhetorical trope employed by statesmen,
religious leaders, artists, and writers, continued to find wide use. As Daniel W. Lane argues,
“metaphors of wrecks, wrecking, and lifesaving … provided a vocabulary for framing personal,
corporate, and national struggles” during the second half of the nineteenth century. 87 But subtle
changes in the meaning of that metaphor took shape as new cultural attitudes emerged alongside
the development of corporate capitalism and spread of consumerism. Certainly the proliferation
of representations of shipwrecks suggested, as David C. Miller argues, a widespread “loss of
faith” in the American corporate enterprise during and after the Civil War. 88 Yet as post-bellum
shipwreck narratives increasingly focused on rescuers rather than the rescued, artists and writers
proudly celebrated American‟s humanitarianism and ingenuity in a new genre of lifesaving
narratives, which focused on the prevention shipwrecks or the application of skill and technology
to rescue lives and property. Winslow Homer‟s The Life-Line, as Lane suggests, “implies that
coastal shipwreck, while hazardous, need not have been catastrophic because American
technology and skill could systematically confront and overcome peril.” 89 Whether they were
inspiring or dispiriting, late nineteenth-century representations of shipwrecks were contested
terrain that resisted narrative closure and invited multiple (often conflicting) viewpoints. In this
way, shipwreck narratives pointed toward distinctly modernist modes of experience that would
be characterized by unsettling ambiguity, uncertainty, and open-endedness.
Finally, in an age of spectacle, shipwrecks became spectacles. Shipwrecks had been an essential
element to the lure of the shore in Western Culture since the mid-eighteenth century. 90 But the
transportation and communication revolutions enabled far more people to learn about and visit
shipwrecks, turning a sublime or romantic sight into a mass spectacle. By the late nineteenth
century, newspapers, popular periodicals, and the emergent film industry regularly detailed the
danger, suffering, and spectacle of shipwrecks to national audiences. 91 These highly standardized
images almost always showed a crowd of spectators, marking the shipwreck as a sight worth
seeing. Representations of coastal shipwrecks recreated the spectacle itself for armchair
86
Kevin Rozario, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 106, 101-132.
87
Daniel W. Lane, “Nineteenth-Century American Shipwreck Narratives and National Identity” (PhD diss.,
University of Delaware, 2002), 228.
88
David C. Miller, “Introduction,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and
Literature, ed. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 11. See also: Miller, “The Iconology of Wrecked
or Stranded Boats in Mid to Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” in Miller, American Iconology, 186-208.
89
Lane, “American Shipwreck Narratives,” 194.
90
Alain Corbin, Lure of the Sea: Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps
(New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 234-240. Lure of the Sea, incidentally, was the inspiration for the title of this
essay.
91
Representative literature includes: Stephen Crane, The Open Boat (New York, 1898); Joanna R. Nicholls, “Cooperation Between Seamen and Surfmen: an Imperative Need of the Life-Saving Service,” Godey’s Magazine,
September 1897, 249-254; Page Milburn, “Two Shipwrecks,” Zion’s Herald, October 1898, 1298; J. Hooker
Hamersley, “Youth‟s Department: Shipwreck,” New York Observer and Chronicle, December 30, 1897, 923. For
representative art see: Winslow Homer, The Wreck, 1896, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Homer, The
Gulf Stream, 1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Harrington Fitzgerald, The Wreck, 1901, Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Washington, DC. On representative film shorts see note 85.
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spectators, enabling a national audience to see and even participate in the spectacles. The curious
(and close) invariably crowded any accessible shoreline with a view of a wreck, turning
shipwrecks into spectacles as much as reporters and newspaper editors did. As the New York
Herald declared in 1896, “The people of New Jersey and visitors from the city let no chance slip
them of seeing a steamer in distress.” 92
Shipwrecks drew the attention of turn-of-the-century Americans because they were
manifestations of the technological sublime, or what David Nye describes as that “essentially
religious feeling” aroused by Americans‟ confrontation with impressive human-made objects and
natural landscapes. 93 Coastal shipwrecks offered compelling vistas of ships—the technological
wonders of industrial America—and the sea—untrammeled wilderness. The New York Herald
captured the essence of this dual sublimity off Long Branch:
There was a strength and symmetry in every line [of the St. Paul]. There were majesty
and power in every curve of the black hull and towering masts… The sunlight glinted
over her snow white railings and her shining brasswork. Her huge bulk, keeled over to
port, gave her the look of a monster which, suddenly trapped, bends every power to be
free again. Over and above her was a mantle of blue, pierced with shafts of sunlight. The
sea, grey and somber, with a ripple of brightness here and there, surged about her. 94
Visitors were truly awed by the display. One Philadelphian declared: “That is a great sight, but it
makes me sad to look at it. Why, I see that ship lying there in my dreams.” A reporter concluded
that, “It was this feeling that made the crowd on the beach a rather quiet one. It stood there and
gazed until curiosity had been satisfied.” 95
Ironically, the frequent coastal shipwreck had the capacity to routinely surprise spectators with
the unexpected. Like other manifestations of the technological sublime, shipwrecks offered
“repeated experiences of awe and wonder, often tinged with an element of terror, which people
have had when confronted with particular natural sites, architectural forms, and technological
achievements.”96 But unlike the technological sublimes Nye examines, shipwrecks suggested the
vulnerability of technology and the impossibility of perpetual “progress.” As the New York Times
editorialized in the wake of the St. Paul salvage, “In spite of the perfection of her equipment, and
of the utmost vigilance of her captain and his aids, she got from out of her course, ran ashore,
and was saved from utter wreck only by her own stanchness of construction and by the favoring
calm of the weather.” 97 Nothing was to blame. Technology did not fail. The captain, according to
this account, did not err. Yet disaster still occurred. What could be done? If nothing could be
improved then human mastery of the sea was simply hubris and the notion of human progress
was fundamentally flawed.
92
“St. Paul Still in the Sand,” New York Herald, January 27, 1896.
Nye, Technological Sublime, xiii.
94
“St. Paul Still in the Sand,” New York Herald, January 27, 1896.
95
“An Impressive Spectacle,” [Philadelphia] Public Ledger, February 3, 1896.
96
Nye, Technological Sublime, xvi.
97
“The St. Paul Report,” New York Times, February 21, 1896.
93
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Bearing witness to coastal shipwrecks resonated with the widespread, if ambivalent
dissatisfaction shared by many late nineteenth-century Americans who, as T.J. Jackson Lears
argues, felt “that life had become not only overcivilized but also curiously unreal.” 98 This was a
complex anti-modern impulse where enthusiasm for material progress coexisted with revulsion
for rationalization, bureaucracy, and hubris. So the lure of shipwrecks and salvage was not
simple. One observer was half right when he argued that spectators traveled to Long Branch “for
the sole purpose of seeing the ship in the sand and with the hope of witnessing her removal.” 99
Primed by visual media, literature, and incessant news coverage, spectators repeatedly found
shipwrecks compelling events because they combined the fear of seeing the pinnacle of modern
technology destroyed with the hope of watching it be saved. More insidiously, shipwreck
spectacles conformed to the “pattern of evasive banality” that characterized turn-of-the-century
American culture, denying social conflict as they affirmed harmony and progress. 100 Though
composed of rural farmers and urban laborers and sophisticates, the crowds that gazed on the St.
Paul were portrayed as a homogenous group of “average citizens” in newspaper articles. 101
Nevertheless, many “average citizens” travelled to shipwrecks like the St. Paul as part of a
broader modern search for authenticity. Well-to-do fin-de-siècle Americans bound in “a
weightless culture of material comfort and spiritual blandness” sought intense physical,
emotional, and spiritual experiences. Attempts to combat this pervasive sense of unreality, to, as
Lears writes, “capture an elusive „real life‟ in a culture evaporating into unreality” manifested
itself in all parts of American life. Popular literature embraced “life as struggle” narratives,
including sea-fights, shipwrecks, and Wild West adventures. Scholars became interested in folk
stories for the first time. And a “cult of the real” dominated contemporary theater, cinema, and
tourism, particularly disaster tourism.102 Shipwrecks, floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes
promised undeniably authentic, or real, experiences that were distinct from the elaborately staged
spectacles epitomized by New York City‟s weeklong 1892 Columbian Celebration, Chicago‟s
1893 World‟s Fair, and the new amusement parks opening around the country. 103 Further still,
travelling to coastal shipwrecks brought authenticity-anxious spectators from the city—“an
emblem of modern unreality”—to an undeniably authentic tourist site—a disaster. 104
98
T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 5.
99
“St. Paul Moved a Short Distance,” [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, January 29, 1896.
100
Lears, No Place of Grace, 7-26.
101
As one local paper wrote: “There appeared to be a peculiar fascination for the average citizen in watching the big
boat and the attendant tugs.” The Times-Record [Ocean Grove, NJ], February 1, 1896. In all the articles consulted
for this article, there are no references to the crises in contemporary America. As Jackson Lears writes about 1896:
“The country was aflame with popular movements of the discontented…The streets outside thronged with
suffragists, Prohibitionists, Socialists, and Populists.” Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 186.
102
Emily Godbey, “Disaster Tourism and the Melodrama of Authenticity: Revisiting the 1889 Johnstown Flood,”
Pennsylvania History 73, no. 3 (2006): 273-315; Lears, No Place of Grace, 32, 103-106.
103
Godbey, “Disaster Tourism”; David Carletta, “The Triumph of American Spectacle: New York City‟s 1892
Columbian Celebration,” Material Culture 40, no. 1 (2008): 19-40; Lauren Rabinovitz, “Urban Wonderlands: Siting
Modernity in Turn-of-the-Century Amusement Parks,” in The American Metropolis: Image and Inspiration, ed.
Hans Krabbendam et al. (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2001): 85-97.
104
Lears, No Place of Grace, 32. Scholars of tourism have demonstrated how this quest for authenticity was
destined to fail because tourism inevitably stages authenticity. See for example, Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A
New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976); Also, the second set of essays in Shelly
Baranowski and Ellen Furlough ed., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe
and North America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), which reject conceptions of authenticity as
Wells
The late nineteenth-century New Jersey coast remained a foreign place to many Americans.
While it was fully incorporated in the modern American state, physically connected to urban
centers by railroads and telegraph lines, and culturally relevant to national audiences, the coast—
the littoral—was not part of most people‟s everyday experience (neither were shipwrecks).
Spectators who traveled to or read about shipwrecks and salvage were disaster tourists. Many
flocked to the scene on trains, carriages, and by foot to gaze upon a sublime scene of destruction
(and sometimes death). Once there, tourists took photographs or purchased souvenirs—tangible
artifacts—that represented something authentic and real. Armchair disaster tourists read graphic
illustrated accounts. To visit and read about shipwrecks and salvage was to mitigate modern
anxieties. As journalist Cleveland Moffett wrote in 1901, “Oh, bored folk, idle folk, go to the
wreckers, say I, if you want a new sensation, watch the big pontoons, watch the divers, and (if
you can) set the crew to telling stories.” 105 Many heeded his advice: the sustained popularity of
shipwrecks and salvage during this period suggests that the spectacle fulfilled, if only partially
(and temporarily), its promise.
Many tried to participate in the spectacle directly in the spectacle even if they could not chat with
the wrecking crews aboard the liner or on the salvage vessels working to save it. People not part
of the salvage effort were forbidden to board the St. Paul, although a few enterprising reporters
rowed out to the wreck and conducted interviews from a fisherman‟s dingy. While physically
excluded, reporters, spectators, and newspaper readers had unprecedented access to this salvage
effort—the St. Paul was the first shipwreck to be connected to the shore by a telephone line.
“Anybody,” explained the New York Sun, “who is willing to give up the price [of the call], a
special one, may indulge in the luxury of ringing up the big ship.” It is unclear exactly how man
people rang, but every afternoon reporters dialed “125, Long Branch” and were connected to
Frederick Reilly, a telephone operator stationed on the St. Paul. Reilly, in his thick French
accent, relayed official statements or passed the phone to Captain Jamison or one of the
wreckers.106 Newspapers offered unprecedented “inside” accounts of the salvage plans and
chronicled every activity aboard and around the stranded liner. Reporters captured the anxieties
of the salvage effort like never before by highlighting the uncertainty—the authenticity—of the
drama off Long Branch.
Armed with a little “insider” knowledge, many in the crowds became active participants on the
strand. And why not? They arrived with a clear (if inaccurate) set of ideas gleaned from the
ubiquitous presence of the sea, shore, and shipwrecks in American culture. So it is unsurprising
that many visitors rather eagerly shared their advice to anyone within earshot. Hours after the
initial wreck, crowds “heartily berated” the lifesaving crews for not having it afloat.107 Later that
week, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin relayed how, “as is to be expected, every individual has
a suggestion or a plan sure to bring satisfactory results if tried. It is positively amusing to hear
farmers, merchants and women discuss the problem of how to float a ship. They threw out
having an absolute value and show how tourist promoters and tourists manufactured or altered notions of
authenticity to meet shifting and contingent priorities.
105
Cleveland Moffett, “Careers of Danger and Daring: First Article: The Diver,” St. Nicholas 28, no. 3 (1901): 206.
106
“Stranded St. Paul Moves,” The Sun [New York], January 27, 1896.
107
“The St. Paul Aground,” New York Tribune, January 26, 1896.
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nautical terms with a recklessness and ignorance that brings the blush to the face of the old
salts.” 108
Efforts to participate in the St. Paul spectacle extended far beyond the environs of Long Branch.
While the liner was aground, thousands of earnest, if naïve, “how to” plans for saving the St.
Paul arrived at the offices of the American Line, the wrecking companies, and newspapers
across the country. The American Line offices in New York City received letters from as far
away as San Francisco by so-called cranks, “people that never saw the ocean and wouldn‟t know
a ground swell from a babbling brook.” 109 An ignorance of the sea was reflected in many of their
schemes, yet newspapers including the New York Tribune, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and
the Baltimore Sun published some of the proposals received in their offices. 110
As the Bulletin‟s commentary suggests, many people‟s efforts to participate in the St. Paul
spectacle bordered on the absurd. On the same day it published a plan concocted by a prominent
city engineer, the Evening Bulletin offered “a picture, not greatly exaggerated, of daily
occurrences at the office of the International Navigation Company” [owner of the St. Paul]. The
reporter described the “queer-looking specimens, long-haired, wild-eyed, anxious” cranks and
their preposterous schemes, which included mobilizing the entire population of the state of New
York, using a giant balloon, dynamiting the sandbar, and using “enormous quantities of oil” to
free the St. Paul. In the process, the Bulletin parodied a host of contemporary topics including
the length of presidential messages, the size of Patent Office reports, and the verbosity of
congressmen, as well as other perennial objects of scorn—medical students, Russian nihilists,
and the Irish.111 The article, in short, mocked spectators‟ earnest pursuit of an authentic
experience.
Where the Bulletin found satire, others found profit. Entrepreneurs and businessmen
commodified the experience of coastal shipwrecks by capitalizing on spectators‟ search for
authenticity. They sold food, transportation, mementoes, and views of the wreck to captive
audiences willing (and able) to spend money on an “authentic” encounter. Shipwrecks resonated
with many turn-of-the-century Americans because they spoke to ideas and issues that mattered to
them. But shipwrecks could only become spectacles when entrepreneurs and businesspeople
enabled crowds to mass near shipwrecks. In this way, the physical or sensory experience of
shipwreck spectacles—the sounds of the hackman selling rides, the smell of popcorn and
chowder stands, the passing glance of the pickpocket searching for a wallet—was embedded in
networks of capitalist exchange. Even when people could see the liner was determined by precise
timetables set by railroad executives.
For crowds who only “knew” shipwrecks as a sight to see, shipwrecks would only be a spectacle
to consume. Yet, even if spectator‟s experiences were bounded by the dictates of industrial
108
“Waiting for the Tide,” Evening Bulletin, January 28, 1896.
“Chat About Prominent Men,” New York Tribune, February 5, 1896. American Line officials and Israel J.
Merritt, the leader of the salvage effort, even “talked over” some of the letters they received. Transcript of Record,
132; 909; RG 276; NARA NY.
110
See for example: “A suggestion for Relief,” New York Tribune, January 29, 1896; “The St. Paul Held Fast in the
Sand,” [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, January 30, 1896; “To Float the St. Paul,” [Baltimore] Sun, February 3,
1896.
111
“Cranks‟ Plans to Move the St. Paul,” [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, January 30, 1896.
109
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capitalism, shipwrecks spectacles offered “ordinary citizens” opportunities for “authentic”
experiences of the sea, shore, and disaster. Like other turn-of-the-century spectacles, shipwrecks
could alleviate many anxieties of modern life. 112 But in their effort to escape the every day,
spectators remained consumers. In their effort to encounter something real, something authentic,
most spectators watched from a safe distance. But that did not really trouble those who traveled
to or read about the St. Paul. Thousands were able to escape the city or their home for a few
hours. Many more whiled away an afternoon reading illustrated accounts. It was the search for
authenticity, not its attainment, that mattered.
“An Aching Void”
At 9:20 a.m. on Tuesday, February 4, four wrecking tugs, aided by a strong northeast wind,
pulled the St. Paul back into deep water. A relatively small crowd of lifesaving men, baymen,
and local residents, braved the cold, inclement weather to watch the tugs cast off their lines. The
liner departed Long Branch ten days after it wrecked, steaming northeast through sleet and snow
squalls, before bearing west after Sandy Hook and worked through a bustling New York Harbor
to its berth off Fulton Street. According to the New York Tribune, only as it began to dock did
nearby vessels give “the pride of the American Line a proud welcome.” 113
News of the successful salvage spread rapidly, and the spectacle continued, if only for another
few days. Half an hour after word of the liner‟s release reached Philadelphia, “everybody seemed
to know it. People who had never been on a steamship in their lives could be heard
congratulating each other as though they owned the St. Paul.” 114 Articles appeared in afternoon
dailies across the country. Over the next two days, papers in Chicago, Minneapolis, New Haven,
Santa Fe, and San Francisco as well as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and London carried
headlines of the wreckers‟ success. 115
In Long Branch, diarist William Maps noted the “great rejoicing on the arrival [of the St. Paul]
in New York” but he neglected to describe the mood closer to home. 116 The summer resort had
lost its winter draw. As one reporter put it, the spectacle had “brought a mint of money to Long
Branch and leaves behind her an aching void.” 117 The crowds did not return that winter.
Businessmen boarded up their hotels and restaurants for the second time that winter. Hackmen
no longer offered rides to see “the wreck,” and the fishermen went back to fishing. In
Philadelphia, Dumont‟s “The St. Paul in the Sand; or, Stuck in Jersey” ran through the end of
112
Wood, Lynching Spectacle, 13.
“In Her Element Again,” New York Tribune, February 5, 1896; “The St. Paul is Floated off the Bar,”
[Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, February 4, 1896; Transcript of Record, 66-67; 909; RG 276; NARA NY.
114
“The News in the City,” [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, February 4, 1896; “The St. Paul is Floated off the Bar,”
[Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, February 4, 1896.
115
“St. Paul is Afloat,” [Chicago] Inter Ocean, February 5, 1896; “The St. Paul is Afloat,” Minneapolis Journal,
February 4, 1896; “The St. Paul Floated,” New Haven Register, February 4, 1896; “Steamer St. Paul Safe,” [Santa
Fe] New Mexican, February 4, 1896; “St. Paul Once More Sails the Ocean,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5,
1896; “St. Paul Safely Floated,” New York Times, February 4, 1896; “Released from Long Branch,” The San
Francisco Call, February 5, 1896; “Floating of the St. Paul,” The Standard [London], February 5, 1896.
116
William Russel Maps Diary, February 5, 1896; William Russel Maps Papers, Collection 212; Monmouth County
Historical Association.
117
“St. Paul Gets Off,” New York Herald, February 5, 1896.
113
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February until it was replaced by a more contemporary skit. 118 Traces of the St. Paul rapidly
vanished from the landscape.
Still, the attenuated spectacle continued in newspapers as the investigation, repairs, and salvage
case ran its course. The marine underwriters began their investigation the day after the St. Paul
docked in New York. A federal investigation by the Steamboat Inspection Service commenced
the following week. The underwriters‟ final report was never published, but the St. Paul was
apparently declared safe for service; after minor repairs in Newport News, Virginia, it was
crossing the Atlantic again by the end of the month. 119 The federal inquiry exonerated Captain
Jamison, finding that he “was not unskillful in the navigation of his ship or negligent of his
duty.”120 The flurry of editorials about this decision effectively concluded the spectacle, even if
the legal consequences of the wreck had yet to run their course. The St. Paul‟s salvage case
appeared in the US District Court in the Southern District of New York in May 1897. By the
time the final decision was handing down by the Circuit Court of Appeals in April 1898, interest
in the St. Paul‟s accident had virtually disappeared. A small blurb hidden deep in a few
newspapers was all the coverage the decision warranted. 121 Few could be negative for long about
this symbol of American industry and maritime success.
The St. Paul‟s successful salvage made it an “icon of American greatness.” 122 Editorialists
lauded every American person, business, or institution connected to the rescue. Commentators
praised the perseverance of the St. Paul‟s owners, the assistance of the federal Weather Bureau,
and the skill of American seamanship and shipbuilding.123 The New York Tribune marveled at
the wreckers who “went on coolly and calmly to apply methods which had been thoroughly
tested by experience, and the result is a marked triumph for skill and sagacity.” 124 Five days after
the St. Paul left Long Branch, the Tribune published “The Trade of the Wrecker,” an article
describing “an industry about which comparatively little is known by the general public.”
Interest in marine salvage, piqued by the St. Paul‟s successful salvage, merited an exposition on
the “great skill and ingenuity displayed by [the] expert hands” of the wreckers. 125 With
successful salvage, American skill, technology, and temperament remained triumphant.
A closer inspection, however, reveals an ambiguous antimodernism lurked in this sea of praise.
Commentators latched onto the Steamboat Inspection Service‟s investigation report because, as
118
“Eleventh Street Opera House,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 18, 1896.
“St. Paul will Sail Wednesday,” New York Times, February 20, 1896.
120
“Capt. Jamison Exonerated,” New York Times, February 20, 1896.
121
“St. Paul Safely Floated,” New York Times, February 5, 1896; “The Stranding of the St. Paul,” New York Times,
February 9, 1896; “The St. Paul Report,” New York Tribune, February 11, 1896; “St. Paul in Newport News,” New
York Tribune, February 12, 1896. The New York Time‟s coverage of the salvage is representative: “Steamship St.
Paul Libelled,” New York Times, June, 12, 1896; “Salvage for the St. Paul,” New York Times, July 25, 1897; “Large
Salvage on St. Paul,” New York Times, April 24, 1898.
122
As David Nye argues: “The popular sublime became part of the emergent cultural nationalism of the United
States in the nineteenth century. The American public celebrated the fact that a spectacular sight was the biggest
waterfall, the longest railway bridge, or the grandest canyon, and they did so with a touch of pride that Europe
boasted no such wonders. Natural places and great public works became icons of America‟s greatness.” Nye,
Technological Sublime, 32.
123
“In Her Element Again” and “The St. Paul Saved,” New York Tribune, February 5, 1896.
124
Editorial, New York Tribune, February 5, 1896.
125
“The Trade of the Wrecker,” New York Tribune, February 9, 2009.
119
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the New York Tribune concluded, it led to “mingled feelings of satisfaction and uneasiness.”
Satisfaction that one of the nation‟s most respected mariners, Captain Jamison, was “vindicated.”
Unease because if nothing could be blamed, how could it be fixed? What could be done to
prevent a repetition of such a disaster “by any other ship on any other voyage?” 126 Even in the
Scientific American, a bastion of modernist thought, traces of ambiguity and doubt remained:
The seagoing steamship embodies some of the greatest triumphs of modern engineering
and science. Yet in spite of this the unavoidable weaknesses and imperfections of the
service go to prove how well founded was man‟s dread of the sea… The fact that the
captain of the St. Paul, which went ashore on the beach at Long Branch, was exonerated
from all blame shows that man has not yet achieved his mastery over the sea with its
concomitants of fogs, gales and ocean currents. 127
Shipwrecks were profoundly unsettling because they embodied the limits or shortcomings of the
modern project. If modernity, as Kevin Rozario suggests, can be characterized as the quest to
make the world safer, shipwrecks were almost-daily reminders of the “catastrophic logic of
modernity”—that the modern project to make the world more secure was underwritten by
unremitting destruction and disaster. 128 To witness a shipwreck was to encounter this
fundamental paradox.
Still, it was a passing (if not subconscious) concern. Most commentators treated the St. Paul how
they treated any other shipwreck. As one commentator concluded: “The incident will not cause a
panic, nor anything like it. It will not deter a single traveler…nor shake the faith of the public in
the seamanship of Yankee skippers and the staunchness of Yankee ships.” The St. Paul, they
argued, should stimulate efforts to find ways of preventing similar disasters in the future to
“make any repetition of the St. Paul‟s misshape, humanly speaking, impossible.” 129 Nothing to
linger over, the St. Paul should inspire Yankee ingenuity to once-and-for-all conquer the sea.
The millennialist vision of America‟s future remained strong.
While the sea has yet to be subdued, the St. Paul shipwreck quickly faded from popular memory.
Hours after it docked in New York, editors of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin brushed aside
concerns as “nonsense and superstition!” that the liner would be marked as a “Jonah,” an
unlucky vessel. They continued: “Besides, these things are easily forgotten.” 130 The Bulletin‟s
prognostication proved correct. The St. Paul soon returned to racing the British liner Campania.
By the end of 1896, the New York Tribune considered a race between the two “the habit of the
ocean greyhounds … whenever they sight each other.” 131 Editorial pages that had denounced
Captain Jamison‟s racing as irresponsible in January and February praised it months later for
proving America‟s maritime prowess. Risks brought rewards. Regarding one particularly quick
trip four months after the wreck that included an eerily reminiscent high-speed run into a New
York Bay blanketed in fog, the New York Times praised the St. Paul for a “great performance”
126
“The St. Paul Report,” New York Tribune, February 20, 1896.
“Modern Steamships and Navigation,” Scientific American, May 9, 1896, 290.
128
Rozario, Culture of Calamity, 9.
129
“The St. Paul Report,” New York Tribune, February 20, 1896.
130
“Off at Last,” [Philadelphia] Evening Bulletin, February 4, 1896.
131
A Campania-St. Paul Race,” New York Tribune, December 5, 1896.
127
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against its technically superior British-built rival. 132 “Which Will be the Winner,” a dramatic
two-page illustration published the following week in Leslie’s Weekly, depicted the two liners
racing in a tempestuous Atlantic. 133 Neither description referenced the accident off Long Branch.
The speed at which the St. Paul stranding was forgotten suggests the frequency of coastal
shipwrecks and seaside spectacles. As daily occurrences along much of the American coastline
for decades after the Civil War, shipwrecks often became spectacles. Businesses and
entrepreneurs commodified the experience of shipwrecks and salvage by tapping into the
popularity of technology and the maritime world and exploiting an “authentic” experience.
Spectators on the beach, like readers in their homes, found a momentary escape from a
tumultuous present. But only in the modern, integrated littoral could coastal shipwrecks become
commercialized spectacles. Shipwrecks and the disaster tourism that accompanied them
reinforced narratives of technological progress and American exceptionalism even as they
symbolized the spectacular, if ephemeral, possibilities of everyday life.
132
133
“The St. Paul,” New York Times, June 28, 1896.
“Which Will be the Winner,” Leslie’s Weekly, July 9, 1896.